Emotionally Selling

Emotional marketing refers to a strategy in advertising that focuses on inducing an emotional connection with the audience to make them notice, remember, and ultimately influence them to buy a certain product. Typically, organisation aim to induce either happiness, sadness, anger or fear, four of our primary emotions, to associate with their products. By doing this, consumers are swayed by their feelings, their hearts and not by logic, increasing emotional relationship with the brand and thus, organisational loyalty.

To successfully implement emotional marketing strategies, you need to:

- Understand who your audience is

This is important for the content creation process. Understanding your audience will guide how your advertisement is designed and it can also predict how effectively the message will be received by consumers. Ultimately, thorough research will indicate which emotion to induce for the most valuable response from the consumer.

- Understand emotions

Happiness makes consumer participate and generally leads to sharing. Sadness makes consumers empathetic and more inclined to give or be inspiring. Fear instils loyalty by associating comfort with the product and anger increases virality which aids in the transmission of the product.

- Tell a story

Story telling evokes a feeling of relatability towards consumers. It engages the subconscious to enhance the emotional connection with the brand. We usually see this method being used for anti-smoking campaigns. These campaigns usually induce feelings of regret, guilt, and fear in consumers to steer them away from smoking and look for hope or a new start with the people they love.

- Have creativity

Colour is known to have a psychological impact on humans. Red induces anger, blue has a calming effect, green symbolises greed… there are emotions attached to all colours of the spectrum like how different sounds create different moods and atmospheres. Understanding how to tap into all five senses to elicit a unique but complex desired emotion will help you amplify the emotional component of your marketing strategy.

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- Understanding intrinsic and extrinsic branding

That is focusing on the ‘consumption experience’ and understanding what is required for the emotional bonding between the brand and consumer (intrinsic) as well as understanding how to contextually brand using websites, advertisements or through social media (extrinsic).

What are some memorable advertisements that have emotionally swayed you?